About .NET Rocks!

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Carl Franklin is Executive Vice President of App vNext, a software development firm focused on the latest methodologies and technologies. Carl is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry,
co-host and founder of .NET Rocks!, the first and most widely listened to podcast for .NET developers, a Microsoft MVP for
Kinect for Windows, a Microsoft Regional Director, and Senior Executive of Pwop Studios,
a full-service audio and video production/post production studio located in Southeastern Connecticut.

He was awarded the MVP for Kinect because of his work on gesture recognition. Namely, KinectTools and GesturePak.
KinectTools is an abstraction over the Kinect 2.0 SDK that takes the detail work out of using the Kinect in a Windows application. GesturePak lets you record, edit, and recognize gestures in a Windows application. Both are free open source products.

Carl is also the creator of Music to Code By, a set of 25-minute long instrumental music pieces designed to get you into a state of flow and keep you there. Music to Code By has been praised widely by
developers for keeping them focused and helping them solve difficult problems.

Carl has been a leader in the .NET community since 2002, and in the Visual Basic (VB) community before that. In the very early days he wrote for Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal, authoring the Q&A column of that magazine as well as many feature
articles for VBPJ and other magazines. He has authored two books for John Wiley & Sons on sockets programming in VB, and in 1994 he helped create the very first web site for VB developers, Carl & Gary's VB Home Page.

Before he started .NET Rocks! in 2002 (three years before the word ‘podcast’ became popular) he developed and taught hands-on training classes for VB.NET and ASP.NET via his training company, Franklins.Net.

Richard Campbell started playing with microcomputers in 1977 at the age of 10. He's really never done anything else since. In that time he's been involved in every level of the PC industry, from manufacturing, to sales, to development, and into large scale infrastructure implementation. He has been a witness and participant to the Bill Gates vision of "A PC on every desktop."

For years he's served as a consultant to companies in many countries, including Barnes&Noble.com, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force, providing advice on architecture, scaling systems and mentoring development teams. His long experience in working with large scale systems made him a sought-after consultant during the halycon years of the DotCom boom. He worked closely with venture capital and private equity firms providing architectural guidance and due diligence.

He is a Microsoft Regional Director and is recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the area ofASP.NET development.

In 2004 Richard first met Carl Franklin, creator of .NET Rocks (www.dotnetrocks.com), The Internet Audio Talkshow for .NET Developers. Richard was a guest on show 69, but his friendship with Carl quickly evolved into a partnership and by show 100 in early 2005 he came onboard as co-host. In 2007 he started RunAs Radio (www.runasradio.com), a podcast for IT Professionals.

He is a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks, which was acquired by Radware in 2013 and spent five years on the board of directors of Telerik which was acquired by Progress Software in 2014.

In 2012 Richard founded the Humanitarian Toolbox (www.htbox.org), an organization designed to let developers around the world donate their skills to disaster relief organizations by building open source software. By 2014, Humanitarian Toolbox became a 501(c)3 registered US charity, working on a number of different projects for the United Nations, US Center for Disease Control and Red Cross.

Today Richard is a consultant and advisor to a number of successful technology firms as well as the co-owner and content planner of the DevIntersection (www.devintersection.com) group of conferences.